Comments on the Potomac Institute's National
Firearms Policy
Part 1: "Individualism" -- What it meant to Tocqueville and to
the Framers
Part 2: Second Amendment Scholarship and the Historical
Record
Part 3: "The People" -- Rowland, Gordon Wood,
and the Second Amendment
By John Crouch, Attorney at Law,
Crouch & Crouch, Arlington, Virginia; (703)
528-6700;
Copyright John Crouch 1998
Other Crouch Articles
The "individualism" that Tocqueville, Mises and Hayek feared
was not individual rights, but total individual self-absorbtion.
Tocqueville observed that democracy and bourgeois society, which were
most advanced in America but were the future in France and other
European countries, threaten to submerge people in disconnected individualism
while at the same time giving them political power over each other. He then
looked at all the social, cultural, and legal institutions that counteracted
this
in America, but he questioned whether such institutions were sufficiently
strong
in Europe, especially France. Tocqueville has another book, with something
about the French Revolution in the title, that develops this theme further,
concentrating mostly on France. I read it but I can't remember the title.
As Tocqueville describes them in that book, these people submerged in individualism
are not anti-
government -- they're more like the stereotype of "soccer moms",
absorbed in
their own affairs and those of their family, without a larger social
conscience, very interested in what govenment can do for them, and not at
all
interested in the good of the whole. While they may be fine, responsible
people in private life, in their attitude to government they are like infants,
interested only in themselves and what they consume, howling for more, and
not concerned at all about the morality of using government as a middleman
to forcibly take what they desire from their fellow-citizens.
The Founders would have agreed with Tocqueville. (What follows draws on
what I
learned as a American History major concentrating on the eras of the
revolution and the constitution in Brown University's very rigorous and
book-heavy program under
Gordon Wood, Bill McLoughlin, and Jack L. Thomas.) The methods the Founders
used to form new governments in 1774-76 revealed that they really did practice
what they
preached about individual consent being the necessary ultimate source of
all
sovereignty (counterbalanced of course by the right of the consenting majority
to exile or ostracize the more stubbornly non-consenting Tories). However,
they did
not believe in individualism as a hedonistic, esthetic preference
for how
people ought to live from day to day. Even Jefferson's "pursuit of
happiness" is something people ordinary do by socially useful, interactive
means within civil society, not alone.
Individual rights gained support in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries NOT
so that people could go off and be free to be you and me, develop their
human potential and express their Selves; rather, people sacrificed their
lives to fight for these rights so that individuals would be free to do
what their interpretation of religion, their consciences, and their sense
of civic duty told them they HAD TO do.
The Founders believed in men's right to choose the government they lived
under, and they believed that to protect the ability to exercise that right,
that particular government could not be allowed such a
monopoly of weapons as would enable it to control the majority without their
democratic consent. In order to prevent tyranny, then, keeping arms and
practicing their use had to be a civic duty and a legally protected individual
right.
(They would have agreed with the Potomac Institute, however, that an actual
or potential near-monopoly of firearms is dangerous in the hands of any
minority of the population, not just in the hands of government.)
Part 2: Second Amendment Scholarship and the Historical
Record
Part 3: "The People" -- Rowland, Gordon Wood,
and the Second Amendment
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